Movie Night at the Cosy Apartment: Closer to the Moon (2014)

Directed by Nae Caranfil; produced by Michael Fitzgerald, Denis Friedman, Alessandro Leone, Bobby Paunescu and Renata Ranieri

It’s 1959 in Bucharest, and young Virgil (Harry Lloyd) is hired as an assistant to a famed but drunken movie-director (Allan Corduner). A year later, Virgil is part of the crew filming a documentary about one of communist Rumania’s most infamous crimes: the armed robbery of the state bank. Treated as a political crime, the perpetrators have been arrested and condemned, but the story hardly ends there, as both Virgil and the state’s security service attempt to find a motive behind the daring and inexplicable caper.

Based on the exploits of the Ioanid Gang, Closer to the Moon of course takes liberties with the truth, but in so doing creates an entertaining and tragic tale of despair and defiance. It is sometimes rated a black-comedy, which shows the span of the genre: it does not extend to the ridiculous as does, say Dr Strangelove, nor does it treat horror as humour, as in Little Shop of Horrors. Here, the comedy is black because the characters laugh in the face of darkness.

The cast, mostly British with some Americans, is uniformly good. Essential to the plot is the belief that the five ‘gang members’ – Max (Mark Strong), Alice (Vera Farmiga), Razvan (Joe Armstrong), Iorgu (Christian McKay) and Dumi (Tim Plester) – are strong friends who know each other very well. The actors leave the audience with no doubt about that. Also giving fine performances are Lloyd as the impressionable but not foolish Virgil, and Anton Lesser as Holban, a frazzled and crafty secret-police officer, who is almost sympathetic.

The writing is good, and involving. It needs to be, since the film tells the viewer very near the start that the gang have been arrested and sentenced to death. It also captures the levity of the friends but makes clear the seriousness of not just the situation but the setting, which, in turn, involves the motive.

The motive, which interests both characters and viewer, has been thought insufficient by some reviewers. In a way, it is similar to the reasons that actuated the title character in the film Stander (reviewed on this blog in November, 2019); like that film, also based on true events, there is no way of knowing what motivated the characters; in real-life the Ioanid Gang’s reasons remain obscure. A huge amount of Rumanian currency is stolen but, as Holban explains, such cash – like all cash from communist countries – is worthless outside its homeland, and spending extravagantly within its homeland would inevitably and swiftly draw the authorities’ attention.

In movies, as in reality, motive depends not on the world’s understanding but on the characters’ perceptions. In Closer to the Moon, the thoughts and personalities of the gang are depicted well enough that the motive is plausible. It may be, in fact, that the reasoning is more explicable to those who have felt oppression – personal or institutional – than otherwise.

Aside from such intricacies, Closer to the Moon is entertaining, which is probably the most important factor in such a film. Though we know the ending, the beginning and middle of the caper are told only as the story unfolds, and this is the process that holds our attention; that and the characters. Also of interest is the view of a population in a totalitarian state, the routine and secret spying the government conducts, and the routine and secret lives the people lead to evade it.